Sustainable work performance based on employee satisfaction is critical to Cisco’s success. Accordingly, our managers are trained and encouraged to make sure employees can successfully balance their work and personal lives. Cisco has a tradition of offering employees the ability to work flexibly while meeting the needs of the business. We want to empower our employees to determine for themselves, in concert with their managers, how they can best manage their job and home responsibilities.

Flexibility, Trust, Empowerment

Flexibility, trust, and empowerment are the hallmarks of the employee-employer relationship at Cisco. Cisco employees require a holistic integration of work, family, health, and home to perform at their best. Our corporate culture is based on trust—the trust that executives invest in managers and other employees, and the trust that employees place in their managers and the company.

From the beginning, Cisco has informally offered employees a large degree of flexibility when it comes to work hours and telecommuting. This is an outgrowth of our corporate culture, which has always focused on achieving results rather than putting in time at the office. Flexibility benefits work-life integration by enabling a work schedule that fits the individual and allows for personal contingencies, such as the need to care for a family member, see a doctor, attend to an emergency, or avoid high-traffic commute hours.

Because most Cisco employees work flexible hours (flextime), there is no stigma attached to using this benefit to fulfill parenting and other responsibilities; it is simply part of how Cisco operates.

Read more about how Cisco promotes well-being among our employees:

Workplace Flexibility: Programs, work environments, and tools that help employees be more productive by working the way they like